


you can stare below into the abyss (find a home on the edge of it)

by bellawritess



Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: :))))))), Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst with a Happy Ending, Crying, Friendship, Gen or Pre-Slash, Hurt/Comfort, LOTS OF!, M/M, Roommates, author is projecting i don't know if you'll be able to tell, it's not a panic attack but it IS an emotional meltdown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:55:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27099991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellawritess/pseuds/bellawritess
Summary: And then, sometime about halfway through the third week of classes, Michael realizes he’s crying.
Relationships: Michael Clifford & Ashton Irwin, Michael Clifford/Ashton Irwin
Comments: 13
Kudos: 31





	you can stare below into the abyss (find a home on the edge of it)

**Author's Note:**

> it's 6am and i have an assignment due for my 1pm class that i haven't done and probably won't do, because i wrote this instead of doing it. so. that's how i'm doing. that's where i'm at.
> 
> quick thank yous to [ainslee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashisonthefloor) and [helen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/softirwin/pseuds/softirwin), for being the ashton(s) i needed when i needed it. i might possibly owe you guys my life
> 
> eta i don't think before i post fics that are written in an emo/angsty haze so if i wake up and it turns out this is terrible i apologize but it's out there now and there is no taking it back
> 
> title from busyhead by noah kahan. i've wanted to write a busyhead mashton fic for awhile, although i have to admit i didn't anticipate it looking like this, but that's life. hope you like it anyway, i guess.

Being in college is hard.

It’s hard for a lot of reasons. For one, Michael’s never felt farther from home, and he’s probably never _been_ farther from home. And he’d never been too good in school, so this new version of school, designed specifically to be more challenging, is not exactly something Michael masters easily. Or at all. He finds himself drowning in work mere days after the first semester starts, before he’s even fully figured out how to get to his classes. 

And he’s never lived in a dorm before, though he’d been kind of looking forward to it, because never before has he had a built-in friend (or at least the potential for one) in the form of a roommate, but — it’s not that Ashton’s not friendly. Quite the opposite. Ashton is big smiles and he’s a sophomore where Michael’s only a freshman and Ashton is _too_ friendly. Michael can’t figure out a way to say _I need at least three hours of sitting in silence every day_ without seeming rude, so he just puts up with Ashton’s constant stream of consciousness or music floating out of his computer — which is good music, at least, so there’s that — or friends visiting in the dorm. Ashton always asks Michael before inviting anyone over, but Michael says yes, because what is he supposed to say? “No, I want to be alone in this dorm room we share”?

The dorm doesn’t feel like home. Michael desperately wants it to, because he’s missing his _actual_ home and he’d tried to bring things with him that would feel like at least a piece of home had come to college with him, but instead it just feels like some poor imitation, as if he’d asked a blind stranger to sketch their best impression of Michael’s bedroom. The framed picture of him with his parents is hardly comforting; the Green Day poster he’d unstuck from his wall only to pin it up in the new room just taunts him. It’s supposed to be edge-to-edge with a blink poster, but Michael couldn’t bring all of his posters, and now this one just looks naked, or incomplete, or, just, wrong. It looks wrong. The room _feels_ wrong, and everything about it is wrong.

Beyond that, he hasn’t cracked the code on how to get to sleep at anything resembling a reasonable hour. He’d never been good at it before and that had been living at home; now that he’s at uni, there’s nobody to hold him accountable, and Michael finds himself in the habit of staying up until five in the morning, until the sun is just peeking over the horizon that Michael can glimpse out his window, and then sleeping the miserable four hours until his 9am. (The _fucking_ 9am). If he could get to sleep earlier, he would, but nobody is telling him to, and Michael is sucked into internet rabbit holes again and again, and so far nobody has suggested he leave it for another day, or for never.

Mornings find him drinking coffee, which he’s never done before, and it doesn’t really help, but Michael figures there must be some kind of placebo effect or something, so he keeps doing it. It probably just makes him more unhappy, but he feels like his whole life is teetering on the edge of spiraling completely out of control, and he just needs to be in charge of _one_ thing, so he drinks coffee and pretends that it wakes him up, and he survives every day in a zombie-like state of self-deception and torment.

And then, sometime about halfway through the third week of classes, Michael realizes he’s crying.

He’s not doing it on purpose. There’s music playing through his headphones, all of his liked songs on shuffle, and he’d just been scrolling through Tumblr, refreshing his dash even though he knows there won’t be anything new, and then — “Going Away To College” had played, and now Michael is crying. It’s the kind of crying he can hide, so he does, ducking his head until it hits against the edge of the desk and squeezing his eyes shut. He doesn’t want to cry. He hasn’t cried since coming here, and — well, it’s not like Ashton thinks Michael’s doing _great_ , when it’s obvious he’s struggling, but Ashton hasn’t seen Michael cry and Michael intends to maintain that streak. He can’t cry. He’s _not._

 _I haven’t been this scared in a long time_ , Mark Hoppus admits, and, okay. Michael’s crying. He pushes one side of his headphones off his ear to see if he’s crying loudly, because he and Ashton have a study double so if Ashton can’t _hear_ him then he won’t realize there’s anything wrong.

Except Ashton crosses to Michael’s side of the room at that exact moment. “Hey,” he starts to say, probably meaning to finish it with something normal like _I’m gonna turn in_ or _did you see the text from the RA?_ , but though Michael tries his best to recover some dignity, he’s too late. “Oh,” Ashton says, and stands there for a moment. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Michael says, obviously lying. He hopes Ashton will take the hint that he doesn’t want to talk about it, or talk at all, or acknowledge that this is happening, but Ashton doesn’t move.

“Okay,” Ashton says. “Uh, do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” Michael says stubbornly, wiping at his eyes and turning away from Ashton, towards the window. He can feel another wave of tears stinging behind his eyes, can hear Mark Hoppus still crooning through one headphone, so he reaches for the controls on his Spotify and pauses it. That’s worse, though; the silence explodes, excavating Michael’s chest until he feels so empty he could just fold in on himself, deflate like a punctured balloon. More than anything, he wants Ashton to go back to his side of the room.

“Okay,” Ashton says again. “If you do, I’m here, you know that, right?”

“I don’t,” Michael sniffles, swallowing with difficulty. Breathing in is doing nothing to fill his lungs with oxygen; they, like the rest of him, are hollowed out, full of nothing, just one big fucking vacuum pulling all of Michael inward. 

“Alright,” Ashton says carefully. Michael can see him reflected in the window, shifting on his feet, more uncertain than Michael’s ever seen him. “I’m — I’ll be right back.”

Michael nods, and Ashton waits another moment, and then leaves the room. As soon as the door clicks shut behind him, everything that’s built up in the void moonlighting as Michael shatters, Michael included, and his shoulders are shaking violently as he slumps over his desk, face buried in his arms. 

He misses home. He misses being at home, seeing his mum in the morning, recognizing his surroundings when he set foot outside the house. He misses when there was someone to tuck him in at night, a reason for him to go to bed before the sun came up. He misses having friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, by virtue of being in classes together. He misses all the posters on his wall. He misses not feeling like this. 

It feels like somewhere deep in Michael’s gut he’s been waiting for a moment like this, like everything awful from the last three weeks has just been slowly and patiently forming a plan of attack, prepared to force their way out of him in furious sobs that rip themselves from his throat without permission, clawing at the inside of his ribcage, making him bleed. When he used to cry it was quiet, never like this, so painful and gut-wrenching that for a moment Michael wonders whether he’d ever cried before right now, because surely _those_ can’t be the same act as _this_ — surely a few minutes of silent tears shed can’t compare to the anguish of this, which Michael has no control over whatsoever.

And he knows he doesn’t have a lot of time, because Ashton will be back soon from wherever he’s gone — bathroom, probably, or to go grab a late-night snack, if Michael’s lucky, which he obviously isn’t — but he can’t stop fucking crying, and he feels pathetic and childish and weak. He should be able to stop and can’t; all he can do is gasp for air whenever possible, trying to calm himself by taking deep breaths even though they’re doing very little for him. And he can’t stop fucking _crying_ , Jesus Christ, _calm the fuck down, Michael, it’s just fucking uni, everybody does it_ — he clenches his hands into fists and his chest is too tight and he wants to scream but it’s three in the morning in the middle of a populated residence hall at college, and he can’t just do things like that anymore, and this isn’t home, this feels so far from home, and Michael wonders if he’ll ever feel at home again.

Another minute passes, and finally the deep breaths are starting to slow Michael’s weeping into shaky, staggered cries, so that by the time the doorknob twists, he’s all but stopped actually crying. He looks awful, and he knows it — he’s cursed to always be obvious about when he’s been crying — but it’s not like Ashton hadn’t seen Michael crying before, so whatever. Whatever.

Ashton steps back into the room. Michael watches him in the reflection from the window. “Do you want to talk about it now?” he asks. Michael scowls and drags the back of his hands over his eyes.

“No,” he repeats.

Ashton goes over to his side of the room. Just as Michael is thinking he’s going to actually leave Michael alone, he comes back with a throw blanket, one of those cheap but impossibly soft ones they sell at Target. He comes near Michael and drapes the blanket over Michael’s shoulders, and Michael just presses his face into his knees where they’re drawn up to his chest. This isn’t what they do. He and Ashton aren’t friends like this. Ashton should just let him be miserable in peace.

Michael should probably know better than that, though. From day one, Ashton had been nothing but kind and inviting. Of course he’s the type of roommate to comfort his roommate despite receiving the cold shoulder.

“You don’t have to tell me why you’re crying,” Ashton says quietly. “I won’t press. But I’m a very, very good listener. And I won’t judge you for crying. I cried a lot last year.”

Michael sniffles. “Don’t be so nice to me,” he says. “I’m being a shithead.”

“You’re not being a shithead,” Ashton says. “You’re just hurting. That’s not the same.”

Michael _is_ hurting; suddenly he’s hurting all over, inside and out, palms smarting where he’d dug his nails into them, exhausted from his breakdown, and everything still aches.

“Last year, I lived with my friend Alex,” Ashton says, leaning back on his heels like settling in to tell a story. “We weren’t friends when I moved in, though, and we didn’t really talk a lot at the beginning. I was really lost, you know, by uni and stuff, and a bit intimidated that he was a year above me, and he seemed to have all these friends and he played guitar and stuff. I know he’s a nerd now, but before I was intimidated.” Michael thinks he recognizes the name Alex as one of the vagrants regularly passing in and out of their dorm. “I spent most of my time in the room, and I wanted to call home all the time, but I didn’t want to seem like I couldn’t get along on my own, so I didn’t. I pretended like I was fine. And then, about a month and a half into the semester, I had a full meltdown.” He crouches down in front of Michael, and though Michael’s only looking in periphery, he can see that trademark Ashton kindness painted over every one of his features. “Alex came back to the room one evening to me crying my eyes out with ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ by Green Day playing on a loop.”

Michael swallows. “Good song,” he says, muffled.

Ashton inclines his head. “Yeah,” he says. “Very good song to have a meltdown to, I guess, if I had to choose one. And even though I’d been pretty unfriendly up to that point, and had turned Alex down every time he’d invited me out, and had overall been a pretty shit excuse for a roommate, he sat with me anyway and talked to me until I stopped crying. And then he gave me one of the best hugs I’ve ever had in my entire life. And he told me that instead of keeping it all inside, I should just make it known whenever I felt miserable, and that way we could tackle it together. Or, if nothing else, I’d feel less — alone. Isolated.” Michael sniffles again, hugging his knees too tight. Ashton gives him a smile that’s almost sad, but not quite. “It worked. Next time I felt sad, I told him I felt sad, and he took me to get ice cream, and by the time we got there I wasn’t sad anymore.”

“This is sounding awfully preachy,” Michael mumbles. His throat feels weirdly dry.

Ashton laughs gently. “Yeah,” he says. “It is. And look, you don’t have to be friends with me. But even if you don’t want to be friends, and just need someone to talk you out of breaking down crying, I can do that too.”

Michael feels his heart suddenly too much in his chest, which is empty of anything else. It takes up more space than it should, and pulses harder than normal, maybe making up for all the beats it had failed to deliver on. “For someone who called himself a good listener, you’re awfully good at talking,” he finds himself muttering. Ashton does the same slight laugh.

“I know you’re deflecting,” Ashton says. “And that’s okay. I think you should go to sleep, though, at least. I think you should sleep more, in general. I always worry when I go to bed before you.”

Michael stays quiet for a long minute. He turns the words over in his mind. Ashton thinks he should go to sleep. Ashton worries, _always_ worries. Even when Michael is pretending like he lives alone in his bubble of misery and homesickness and stress, Ashton is thinking of Michael, worrying about Michael, if he’s to be believed. And even though Michael had repeatedly refused help, Ashton had provided help unbidden. Michael realizes that he’s no longer crying, and the tightness in his chest has lessened enough that he can breathe easy.

“I just miss home,” Michael whispers, tucking his chin between his knees and staring fixedly at the windowsill. “That’s all.”

Ashton nods. “Anything else?”

Michael swallows. “I’m — I’m really stressed. I keep getting more assignments when I’m already behind on the first ones. I don’t know how to keep myself on track, though, you know? So I just keep falling further and further behind and staying up late pretending like I’m going to get the work done when I know I won’t. So then I don’t get enough sleep, _and_ I’ve gotten nothing done. And the stress just keeps adding up.” He closes his eyes. “It’s just — I feel like I should have figured this out by now, but I haven’t. And it’s really hard. Uni is really hard.” 

There’s a minute of silence. Then Michael hears Ashton move, and opens his eyes to see Ashton has stood up. “Do you want a hug?” he asks.

It’s such a simple question, but it knocks the wind out of Michael. “Yes,” he breathes. “I do.”

He stretches his legs out until his feet hit the floor, then unsteadily gets to his feet, and Ashton immediately wraps him up in a hug.

Michael buries his face in Ashton’s shoulder, allowing himself to be held just for now, comforted by Ashton’s strong, safe embrace. He smells nice and he holds Michael steady, and neither of them says anything or moves at all. Ashton doesn’t make any attempt to pull away, and Michael is grateful, because he can feel himself tearing up again, although not from sadness this time, exactly.

It’s just, he hadn’t realized until Ashton had offered how much a hug would help.

Once Michael feels certain he’s in control of himself again, he reluctantly shuffles back. Ashton drops his arms from around Michael and gives Michael a look that is so warm Michael thinks he might overheat under its gaze.

“You should go to sleep,” Ashton tells him, softly. “Everything feels worse at night, I promise you.”

Michael ducks his head. “Thank you for being, um, nice,” he says uneasily. “Even though I’ve been a shitty excuse for a roommate. And not very friendly.”

“It’s okay,” Ashton says, and it sounds like he means it. “And I’m happy to be here for you. All I ask is that in the future, you let me know when you’re feeling bad. I can’t help if I don’t know, and I don’t want to wait until I walk in on you having a breakdown again.”

Michael huffs. “Okay,” he concedes without really thinking. It seems like a small thing to ask for the kindness Ashton’s afforded him tonight, the least Michael can do. 

“Also,” Ashton says mildly, “I’d recommend you take a day off tomorrow.” Michael makes a face of protest, already prepared to explain why he can’t, but Ashton continues. “Michael, take a day, sleep in, call home, catch up on some of the work, email your professors — I promise they’ll be more understanding than you expect — and take some time to yourself _without_ feeling like you should be working instead. You have no idea how much good a day off can do.” 

Michael stares. “I have class tomorrow,” he says meekly.

“You don’t have to attend every class,” Ashton tells him. “You get a certain amount of misses before it affects your grade, right? That’s for a reason.”

Michael had been saving those for emergencies, but maybe, just maybe, this could qualify as an emergency. And Michael can’t help thinking that Ashton would know. After all, Ashton’s been in his shoes, and he’d still made it to his sophomore year.

“Okay,” he says, and the moment he agrees it feels like a colossal weight has been lifted off his chest. “I can do that.”

“Good,” Ashton says, reaching out and squeezing his shoulder. “That’s a good plan.”

It’s hardly a plan, more of a non-plan, and it’s basically Ashton’s non-plan, but Michael appreciates it nonetheless.

“Thank you,” he says.

Ashton smiles at him. “Of course,” he says. “Now please go to sleep. We can get ice cream tomorrow.”

Michael tilts his head in deference. He shrugs the blanket off his shoulders and returns it to Ashton, and Ashton just strokes it and says, “Trusty old blanket. Never fails.”

As Michael finishes preparing for bed and flicks the lights off, he does a quick self-assessment. The drain from crying is pulling him towards the brink of sleep, faster than he’d normally be able to drift off, but more than that, for the first time since moving in, he doesn’t feel like he’s falling asleep a stranger in a strange land. Finally he has an ally. Ashton meets his gaze through the darkness as Michael settles his head onto his pillow, and he smiles again, and Michael feels warm, unexpectedly.

It’s the first thing that’s made Michael feel at home here.

Maybe he’ll be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> fellow college students, oh my god, please take breaks and go easy on yourself. everyone else, i hope you know that you just read an account of my college life in fic format. (okay not actually because my roommate and i were fast friends but OTHER THAN THAT). at any rate. [@clumsyclifford](http://clumsyclifford.tumblr.com/) on tumblr if you want to say hi. love you lots <3


End file.
